Whiplash River

by Lou Berney

  Shake didn’t think Gina was really jealous. Evelyn was pushing forty, she was a cop. She might be attractive and smart, tough and funny, and she seemed interestingly complicated in a way that only a woman pushing forty could be, but . . .

  Shit.

  “It gets worse,” Shake said. To Quinn, but that put the brakes on Gina.

  Shake told them how Evelyn had threatened to hink their score if he didn’t agree to dime out the Armenians.

  “Well, it’s been fun, fellas,” Gina said. She stood up.

  “Now just hold on,” Quinn said. “Let’s think this through.”

  The guy, Shake had to give it to him, he never stayed down for long.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Shake heard himself saying. He thought it might actually be, in terms of their score, but he didn’t want to see Gina walk out that door. That would be the end of the world for Shake. The end of something.

  Or maybe, Shake worried, Quinn’s demented optimism had rubbed off on him, God help us all.

  “You’re both cu-fucking-ckoo,” Gina said.

  “I’m just saying let’s think it through,” Quinn said. “Let’s sleep on it. Because what does this change? We were gonna have to be extremely careful one way or another, whether there’s an FBI agent on Shake’s ass or not.”

  “She doesn’t have any idea about Devane,” Shake said. “Or Teddy Roosevelt’s speech. She’s just punching in the dark and hoping she hits something.”

  “Yeah she is!” Gina said.

  “She doesn’t have jurisdiction. I doubt she’s even supposed to be here, not officially.”

  “She must be smitten.”

  “This FBI gal,” Quinn said. “She’s bluffing.”

  “Does she seem to you like the kind of gal who bluffs?” Gina asked Shake.

  Shake hesitated. “No.”

  “I don’t think so either.”

  “When’s that ever scared you?” he asked her.

  “Don’t do that,” Gina said. “Asshole. You have no right.”

  “God Almighty,” Quinn said. “Will you two just go ahead and jump in the sack already?”

  “This isn’t about jumping in the sack,” Gina said.

  “No,” Shake agreed. “That was never the problem.”

  “Then buy the girl an engagement ring, or you, tell him it’s over for good and put him out of his misery. Both of you, I don’t care, get your heads in the goddamn game.”

  Shake didn’t say anything. Gina didn’t say anything.

  “I apologize for being brusque,” Quinn said. “All I’m saying, I’m saying let’s just all of us get a good night’s sleep and in the morning we revisit the issue of the FBI gal on Shake’s ass, decide in the light of day if it’s a deal breaker or not. Okay?”

  Shake waited to see if Gina would answer first. But he knew she never would, not in a million years.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Whatever,” Gina said.

  Chapter 37

  Babb waited until a little after midnight, then strolled up to the hotel. The metal detector in the lobby didn’t worry him because he didn’t have any metal on him that might be detected. Gardenhire had made arrangements.

  At the metal detector in the lobby, Babb pretended to be rumpled and ruffled. He pretended he needed a pot of coffee. That darn message alignment, harrumph, harrumph. The soldiers barely glanced at him. Babb collected his wallet and change from the tray and continued on.

  Gardenhire had made arrangements for the gun to be placed behind an ice machine on the third floor. A suppressor too. Babb was ambivalent about an arrangement like this. It took a lot of the sauce off a job, to be honest. Some of the sauce.

  He used the house phone in the lobby to request, in a rumpled, ruffled way, immediate housecleaning for room 519. Babb picked that number because May 19 was his birthday.

  He went to the fifth floor and waited. A few minutes later a housekeeper pushed her cart out of the service elevator. She knocked lightly on the door to room 519. No answer. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. The housekeeper used her key to let herself into the room. Babb walked quickly toward the housekeeping cart she’d left in the hallway.

  A commotion had erupted in room 519. What’s going on? Who are you? So sorry! Housekeeping! What? So sorry! What’s going on, honey? You called for housekeeping! We did not! So sorry!

  Or so Babb imagined, since the commotion was in Arabic.

  He plucked the clipboard from the housekeeping cart without slowing down and continued on to the privacy of the fire stairs.

  The clipboard listed the names and room numbers of every guest in the hotel. Babb ran his finger down the list. Only about half the rooms were occupied. Cleary, Quentin was in room 1011. That was Quinn’s Armenian mob bodyguard, Bouchon, the alias he used. Across the hall, in room 1012, was Clement, Gina. The woman Babb had seen with the bodyguard, she’d joined the gang in San Francisco. Next door to her, in room 1013, was Atwood, Fritz. That was Quinn, the primary target, his nom de guerre. There were no other guests on that side of the floor.

  Babb always had a hard time deciding whom to kill first. It was a big decision! There were so many variables to consider. In general, logistical concerns aside, Babb liked to save the best for last. But that in itself, a definition of best, was complicated. And people could surprise you. Who tried to scream, who tried to fight back, who mutely accepted the cool breeze of fate, a look of sullen aggrievement in his or (usually, when it came to sullen aggrievement) her eyes. Oh, fate, those eyes seemed to say, what shit have you pulled on me now?

  This hotel didn’t have cameras in the hallways, and Gardenhire had made arrangements for a master key card to be left with the gun. Babb took the fire stairs up to the tenth floor. He slipped the master key card into the slot of room 1012. He’d decided to kill the woman first. It just seemed appropriate. Ladies first?

  The lock turned green. Babb opened the door. It was not bolted. He was disappointed, a little. He knew several different ways, each of them simple and elegant, to get past the bolt of a hotel room door. He could have taught a child to do it. Hotels didn’t want their guests to know how easy it was to get past a bolted hotel door.

  He slipped inside the room. Dark, the drapes pulled. He could tell instantly that the room was empty, but he checked anyway. It was empty.

  Okay, Babb told himself. Hmmm. Maybe the woman was across the hall in the bodyguard’s bed. A double Dutch. That would add some sauce to the job.

  Don’t get your hopes up, he told himself.

  Babb told himself, in the hotel on the bank of the Nile, not to get his hopes up.

  He let himself into the room across the hall. That room was empty too. The bed was empty.

  Well, crap, Babb thought. Because he’d gone and let himself get his hopes up.

  He checked the bodyguard’s closet and drawers. Empty. There was no toothbrush next to the sink.

  Babb went back to the woman’s room. Nothing in the closet, nothing in the dresser, no toothbrush next to the sink. The same situation in Quinn’s room.

  The three of them were gone.

  But why? To where? Not too far. Babb had a feeling.

  It was a mystery, but Babb didn’t mind. He liked mysteries. He liked a job with sauce.

  “MOHAMMED,” EVELYN SAID. “HEADS UP. There they are.”

  Evelyn and her driver had been lurking for a couple of hours. Down the drive from the hotel, parked across the street, with a good view of the main entrance. Mohammed sitting on the hood of his spotless Mercedes and working his way steadily through a pack of unfiltered Camels. Evelyn sitting next to him, using her hand to beat away the smoke. Assuring Mohammed that everything he’d learned about the FBI from American TV shows and movies was exactly accurate. Mohammed practicing his English by waxing nostalgic about his salad days as a dive instructor, long ago, in Hurghada, a city on the Red Sea.

  Mohammed was close to fifty years old, but the joys of Hurghada made him squeal like
a teenage girl. “Oh, my Gaaaawwwd, Evelyn! The water so clear! You do not believe it!”

  Evelyn had started asking certain questions just to hear him squeal.

  Was the fish tasty and fresh in Hurghada, Mohammed?

  The fish, Evelyn, oh, my Gaaawwwd!

  “I see them,” he said. He took a long last drag of his latest Camel and flicked it away.

  Gina had a roller bag, as did the International Man of Mystery. Shake was carrying a plastic sack. Evelyn had thought they might switch hotels after she dropped in on them. She loved being right.

  She and Mohammed got back in the Mercedes. Mohammed started the car. They watched a hotel bellhop load the roller bags into the trunk of a cab. Shake, Gina, and the International Man of Mystery squeezed into the backseat. The cab looped around, drove down the drive, and turned left just across the street from where Mohammed and Evelyn sat idling.

  Evelyn waited until the cab was a block away, two blocks. Mohammed eyed her.

  “Yalla bina!” she said. Mohammed had taught her that phrase. He said it meant “Let’s go!” in Arabic.

  “Giddyup!” he said, the phrase that Evelyn had taught him back, as he swung into traffic behind the cab.

  Chapter 38

  Gina had forgotten to pull the drapes in the new room last night. Dawn went off like a bomb. She groaned and lifted her head off the pillow and squinted. She peeled a strand of her hair off her lips. Jet lag. She’d just about had it up to here, sister, with jet lag.

  Their new hotel was even swankier than the last one, with fantastic toiletries in the bathroom. It had been Gina’s idea last night to switch hotels, but the guys had been thinking the same thing too. Their new hotel was across the bridge and closer to the center of town, just off the main square.

  She reached for the glass of water on the nightstand and drank. “Want some?” she said.

  Shake was awake too, squinting and groggy. “We forgot to pull the drapes.”

  “Wonder why?”

  “Give it.”

  She handed him the glass. He drank what she’d left him.

  Last night they’d taken a cab to their new hotel and booked three rooms using the name on Gina’s fall-back passport. Katherine Keel. Quinn had made a beeline for the hotel bar while Gina and Shake had taken the elevator upstairs together. They hadn’t said a word to each other the whole way up.

  “So?” Shake said when they got to their rooms. His room was across the hall from hers.

  “So what?” she said.

  “So are you gonna take Quinn’s advice? Finally tell me it’s over between us and put me out of my misery?”

  “I like your misery.”

  He kissed her. She let him. Well, she did more than let him.

  “What was that other thing Quinn said we should go ahead and do?” he said. “Something about the sack? Jumping in it?”

  “I’m not jealous of Little Miss FBI. I want to make that clear.”

  “It wasn’t already?” He looked genuinely surprised. He better have.

  “It’s over between us,” she said, then kissed him again.

  “That’s a relief,” he said, and kissed her back.

  It took them about half a heartbeat to get from the hallway into her room and across the room and into the sack. It was like they’d teleported there, and out of their clothes.

  Now, this morning, Gina didn’t know how she felt about what had happened. It was hard to know how you felt about anything with a hard bright desert dawn exploding in your face.

  She knew how she felt about the sex itself. The sex had been good. She’d been aching to feel Shake’s weight pressed against her again, inside her, through her. She’d been aching to kiss him and taste him and burn her lips on the stubble along his chin. Plus she’d been pretty horny in a general sense too. It wasn’t all soft-focus curtains billowing in the breeze.

  Shake hadn’t learned any new tricks in their two years apart. Or he was smart enough not to show them to her. She showed him a few new tricks of her own, just to make him suffer. Okay, okay, she doubted the new tricks had made him suffer much.

  “This doesn’t mean what you think it means,” she said.

  “What do I think it means?”

  “That all is forgiven and forgotten and we’re back together now.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “If you buy me an engagement ring like Harry told you to,” she said, “I really will kill you.”

  “Is it such a bad idea?”

  “It is.”

  She got out of bed and walked to the window. Stretched. The warmth of the sun felt good on her bare boobs.

  “Put your boots on,” he said.

  She turned, surprised. This was a first in her experience, if she did say so herself. “You want me to get dressed?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He smiled. She got back into bed.

  Later, quite a bit later, they ordered room service and ate in bed.

  “Next time I’m not going anywhere that doesn’t have really good food,” Shake said. “Italy or Thailand. Mexico.”

  “Next time.”

  “The hummus is decent. But I just can’t get excited about hummus.”

  “This brings back memories, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “That was your plan.”

  “Yes.”

  “But last time, remember, everything ended up sideways.”

  She wanted to see how he’d respond to that. He went for the safe play.

  “I think we can pull this off,” he said. “There are a lot of moving parts, but Devane is too smart for his own good.”

  “Harry’s a liability. You know that, right? I love the guy, Shake, but.”

  “All he has to do is stay on script.”

  She looked at him. He didn’t say anything.

  “Is it worse than I think?” she said.

  “That first time in my restaurant, he kept calling the guy a punk, the guy who was trying to shoot him.”

  “While the guy was trying to shoot him?”

  “And he hijacked a snorkel boat.” He moved the room-service tray to the floor. “I need a shower.”

  “Shake,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tell me you haven’t even considered it.”

  “What?”

  He knew very well what she was talking about.

  “I’m not cutting a deal with Logan James,” he said.

  “He wants Harry, not you. Give Harry up and it could save your life.”

  “That’s debatable.”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “No.”

  “Why? Is Harry the father you never had?”

  Shake laughed. “God help me.”

  “He drives you crazy.”

  “You think?”

  “But you haven’t considered giving him up to Logan James, not for a minute.”

  “I haven’t.”

  She believed him. It astounded Gina, but she believed him. It also astounded her, it really did, that she wouldn’t want Shake any other way. She scooted closer and laid her head on his chest.

  “Tell me why it’s such a bad idea,” he said. “Getting you an engagement ring.”

  “You were right,” she said after a minute.

  “About what?”

  “I would have left you.”

  He took hold of her chin and tilted her head up so he could look into her eyes.

  “What?” he said.

  She sighed. “You said you left because you were scared I’d leave you first.”

  “Go on.”

  “I mean, I wasn’t planning to leave you. It wasn’t, like, impending. And I wouldn’t have just dropped a fucking note on the kitchen table and hopped a plane, by the way, let’s get that clear.”

  “But.”

  This was the problem with the truth, Gina thought. Fuck the truth! When did telling the truth, or admitting it to yourself, ever make you feel anything but s
hitty?

  She’d been so happy back in Santa Monica with Shake. She couldn’t have been happier. But.

  She twisted her chin loose from his hand and laid her head back on his chest.

  “I was scared too,” she said.

  “That I’d leave you?”

  “No! Are you kidding? I never in a million years thought you’d be that big an idiot.”

  “Okay. So what were you scared of?”

  She had been scared of getting bored. She had been scared that she might already be bored. There was one kind of happiness that was a state of equilibrium, there was another kind of happiness that was—the opposite of that. That was the kind of happiness that Gina had always known and loved.

  “You remember how we’d walk down to the Palisades every night and watch the sunset?”

  “You didn’t like watching the sunset?”

  “I did. But sometimes you’d watch the sunset and I’d watch the planes taking off from LAX. I’d watch a plane take off for parts unknown and I’d get, I don’t know, a tingle.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  She just laughed.

  “And now?” he said.

  “I think I’ve changed.”

  “You’re ready to settle down?”

  “Exactly. It’s just exactly that simple.”

  His warm hand rested on her shoulder. Her cheek rested on his warm chest. Underneath the smell of hotel soap and sex and swanky cotton sheets, he had a very distinct smell. Shake’s smell was like coming home.

  “You know I’m aware,” he said. “What you might be doing right now. You should be aware that I don’t care. I’ll take it.”

  “I’m not doing it right now,” she said. She needed to pee, but it felt so nice lying here with him. “Yesterday at breakfast, you were up at the buffet, Harry was telling me his whole big plan for fertility tourism.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “It’s not the world’s worst idea, actually.”

  “Gina,” Shake said. “We’re right for each other.”

  “So what if we are?”

  “Would you say yes if I bought you a ring?”